Guy Trammell Jr. and Amy Miller
This column appears every other week in Foster’s Daily Democrat and the Tuskegee News. This week, Guy Trammell, an African American man from Tuskegee, Ala., and Amy Miller, a white woman from South Berwick, Maine, write about honey and honey bees.
By Guy Trammell Jr.
In 1892, Margaret James Murray, who wanted African American women to learn economically beneficial skills, organized the Lady Beekeeper Club of Tuskegee Institute, one of the first of its kind. The club was so highly regarded across the country that A.I. Root, a national master beekeeper, acknowledged the group in his 1901 article “Gleanings in the Culture.” The Lady Beekeepers’ confidence in their apiary abilities was such that they didn’t use protective gear to tend the hives.
After George W. Carver arrived at Tuskegee in 1896, he assisted with aviary training as the school farm grew and needed more hives. In 1902 he was able to devote more time to research with the arrival of George Ruffin Bridgeforth, the new school farm manager who had been the first African American student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He also taught landownership and became one of the largest Black landowners in Alabama. Bridgeforth founded the Southern Small Farm Land Company, which created the all Black community of Beulahland in Limestone County, Ala.
Bees are truly busy creatures. A queen bee lays up to 2,000 eggs per day. Bees pollinate about 80% of all flowering plants. A hive can produce 100 lbs. of honey annually.
During cold season, my mother mixed pine tar with honey for a soothing cough syrup. Leaving grade school one afternoon, I passed a man on a ladder at a dormitory, dropping things into the grass. I spotted a honeycomb in the grass, snatched it up, and ran down the sidewalk to enjoy the after school snack. On family trips to Florida, we brought back spun honey. It spread like butter, with an orange flavor. I use honey with biscuits, tea and more.
In 1893, Booker T. Washington advised Charles Henry Turner on his career before he became a Clark University Atlanta instructor. Turner later became the first African American to earn a zoology PhD from the University of Chicago. His insistence on mentoring African American students brought rejection for college positions, so Turner became a lifelong instructor at St. Louis’ Sumner High School.
Without access to professional research equipment, he invented his own apparatus and became the first person to identify insect hearing, learning and adapting. He discovered that bees see color and patterns, and published over 70 research papers.
Turner was a civil rights leader who proclaimed education can change behavior in both Black and white racists. Using his animal research, he described racism’s two forms: one is based on an unconditional response to the unfamiliar; the other is based on principles of learning such as imitation.
Amazing!! An overqualified high school teacher, with inadequate research equipment, produces monumental scientific discoveries and finds insight into our cataclysmic disease of racism.
By Amy Miller
I learned today that harvesting too much honey may not be so great for bees. I wonder, then, does this mean I have to question the morality of this natural and nutritious sweetener that is like heaven on toast and in tea and Mama Juanas, one of my favorite cocktails.
The good news, I learned, is that harvesting is not the cause of declining bee populations. Pesticides and climate change get credit for that.
More good news is that, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, several states, especially Maine, are seeing significant increases in colonies of honey bees, the only bees that produce honey. Honey bees, which first came to Maine with Europeans in the early 1600s, were named the state insect in 1975 in recognition of their role in not just honey, but pollinating crops in general.
Maine, which produces about half a million pounds of honey a year, saw colony numbers grow by 73% between 2018 and 2020, the biggest jump of any state in the country. That honey comes from more than 10,000 colonies around the state.
Still, bees survive on the honey they make from nectar and when we take too much of it from hives and replace it with substitutes like sugar water, we are not doing the bees any favors. Buying honey from your local farmer in smaller amounts rather than from large agro-companies ensures more sensitive treatment of the bees. And although many of the bees in Maine are housed by big companies, many are in the hives of hobbyists and small, family-owned apiaries.
A typical honey bee makes just a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey during its lifetime of 30 to 60 days And to make a pound of honey, bees fly something like 55,000 miles and take nectar from 2 million flowers.
A woman who lives a few miles from me in Somersworth, NH, was cited for violating a local ordinance that limits lawn height to eight inches or shorter. The woman saw bees thriving in the wildflowers on her lawn and wanted to continue hosting them. With bees visiting between up to 100 flowers on each work trip, her un-mowed lawn was there to help.
Now Somersworth is looking at changing its ordinance in keeping with the times. Town leaders are learning that dandelions, for instance, are great for bees and their pollinating duties.
In the more good news department, it seems the value of bees is now competing with our love for country club lawns. And maybe I can keep eating honey, as long as I buy it from a neighborhood farm.
Oh, and as far as my favorite cocktail. Mama Juana is a Dominican drink made with rum, bark, spices and enough honey to keep dozens of bees busy for their whole lives.
Amy and Guy can be reached at Colorusconnected@gmail.com
